Preview May 2018

This was a difficult month, and i was slowly running away from my FIRE objective. It is harder and harder for me to achieve my goals, because of a loan that i took in times of need. Now seems that is sitting screwed on my brain, and the only way to achieve piece is to pay it completely, as soon as possible, instead of waiting the whole 5 years for the monthly payments. The rest of the work is still in progress, and i will probably do not see much profit until the summer of 2019. I am not very patient at the time. I made also a major mistake with the match betting, also not the same magnitude of the previous one (1500), this time it was only 320 of my profit, and hopefully i learned to not repeat it in the same way. I will probably have a minimal profit on matched betting this month, and i used a good part of the cash reserves to book flights for two future holidays in August and September. I try to use the passive income for the coming holidays, as i do not want to get money fro my wages.

Let's see what future brings (Hopefully a lot of luck in the coming World Cup betting)!

The numbers will be posted as soon as the month is finished.

Mistakes - part two

If you understand something intellectually as a concept, but you are not integrating that emotionally, sometimes you can make mistakes. As i did few days ago. Do not do like me, train yourself to not answer emotionally, but to follow the proven knowledge. Even if i know that i am prone to this kind of mistakes, i guard myself, but i am still doing them. Twice this year, my emotions got me in trouble. Same scenario, and i still not learned my lesson. So, from now on, i will give a 6 hours interval to react to this events.

What it this about? When you invest in something, you do your research, and you know that is a proven investment, and it starts to drop in value, fast. Normally, first response is panic. And you want to sell. If you age going for the long term, you should buy, not sell. But talking about me, i sold instead of buying, and this lack of control made me to potentially lose £5500. How do you deal with this emotional response? Is this something related to experience, or we just need to buy and forget until the time will come? Because to me seems that micromanaging too much will get you less profit than doing everything automatically, like a financial robot.

Mistakes

They say that the intelligent person learn from his mistakes, the wise one from other's mistakes. Despite reading about this specific one, and learning about the psychological mechanisms behind this kind of behaviour, i did it myself 6 weeks ago. Seems like i am only intelligent, not wise, at the moment. A costly error, in fact a suit of 4-5 wrong decisions that spiraled in a catastrophic result, wiping out almost £1500. Took me 60 days of consistent work to recover, with more than 120 hours of real work. I will make this kind of error again? Probably not soon. As i had the feelings related to this and i learn. We are not perfect. And we need to realize that sometimes we will make the wrong decisions. Ideally, we should learn and never do it in the same way. A genius is the one that make hundreds on mistakes, but not the same one twice. And sometimes, in between our 101 mistakes, we do the right kind of mistake, and we discover something revolutionary. This is one way. The other way is to not test, to choose the traditional verified course of events, and to reach our objectives. But in the end, we will not have a story to tell. Perhaps we do not even need to tell a story. As long as we are there, where we aim to be.

Which way is the best to follow?